Posted in Art, College buildings, tagged artists, Painting, prints on February 22, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Enjoy this assortment of artistic views of Johnson Chapel and College Row from the Buildings and Grounds Collection. Click on each image to see a larger version, with more details about each piece.
Posted in Amherst College, College buildings on January 8, 2018| 1 Comment »
Phyllis (Schroeder) Forney and her husband Martin Forney perform an ice dancing routine.
The Walter S. Orr Rink opened 63 years ago this month—dedicated on January 15, 1955. The dedication ceremony, led by Dean Eugene S. Wilson (Class of 1929), included speeches by Trustee Francis T. P. Plimpton (Class of 1921), President Charles W. Cole (Class of 1927), and Walter S. Orr (Class of 1912), the rink’s namesake and major donor. The formal ceremony was followed by two figure skating performances and an Amherst College vs. UMass Amherst hockey game (which Amherst lost, 5-4).
Posted in Amherst College, Amherst College Faculty, College buildings, College History, Emily Dickinson, Fraternities, Massachusetts history, Town of Amherst, Uncategorized, tagged Amherst College, Amherst College history, Apples, Edward Clarke Cabot, Edward Tuckerman, Eliza Tuckerman, Friends of Emily Dickinson, gardening, Sarah Tuckerman on August 12, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Three apples from “Apples of New York,” by Spencer Ambrose Beach.
The Northeast Organic Farming Association summer conference takes place this weekend at Hampshire College. One of the first seminars was “The Full Skinny on Healthy Orcharding” with Michael Phillips from Lost Nation Farm in New Hampshire. Yours truly was there, learning about fungal duff management and other good things. (more…)
Posted in Amherst College, Amherst College Faculty, College buildings, Fraternities, Photography on April 14, 2016| 1 Comment »
Today we’re taking a quick peek at the Amherst of 120 years ago. William J. Newlin was a student at Amherst College from 1895 to 1899, he later returned as a Mathematics and Philosophy professor and taught here for nearly fifty years. We have a handful of glass plate negatives that Newlin took as a student and that now reside in our photograph collection. Followed by the photographs of Allan W. Forbes a mere ten years later, these images tell an interesting story about life at Amherst College a little more than 100 years ago.
click on an image to see it larger
Posted in Amherst College, Amherst College Alumni, Amherst College Faculty, Amherst College Presidents, Amherst College Trustees, College buildings, College History, Manuscripts, Philopogonia Society, Slavery, Town of Amherst, tagged abolition, Amherst College history, Henry G. Van Lennep, Old Hadley Cemetery, Rev. John Brown, Wellington Hart Tyler, William Seymour Tyler on October 16, 2015| Leave a Comment »
An old letter is like a present. Its handwriting is the wrapping paper: before you can see or know the present, you have to unwrap it. The present may be lousy, something you’ll quickly forget. Or it might be something you keep, something you take with you, maybe even something that changes your life. But you’ll never know until you unwrap it.
Sometimes a present is for sharing, like the one-pound chocolate bar in your colleague’s desk drawer. I recently unwrapped such a present –a letter full of delicious nuggets — and want to share it with you because it has lingered in my mind ever since I first read it.
The letter is from William Seymour Tyler, Class of 1830, to his brother Wellington Hart Tyler, Class of 1831. The letter is dated January 30, 1837, when both men were in their mid-twenties. Wellington (apparently nicknamed “Edward”) was principal at an academy in Manlius, New York, while William was at Amherst College teaching Latin and Greek and heading into his glory days as the man whose tardiness inspired the founding of the Philopogonian Society. We often think of Edward Hitchcock, professor and president, as the emblem of early Amherst College, but Tyler was here just as long and served just as devotedly. His “History of Amherst College” continues to be a very valuable, reliable resource, and he was the author of other, more modest works, including the nicely named “Why Sit Ye Here Idle?” (more…)
Posted in Amherst College, College buildings, Photography on October 9, 2015| 3 Comments »
This picture was taken on May 10th, 1906, looking south at Walker Hall (left) and Williston Hall and college row (right). Forbes was standing on what would now be the street in front of the Arms Music Center.
One of the projects that I’m working on right now is a complete survey of all the photographic and audio/visual materials in our collections. The ultimate goal of the survey is to make sure that all of these vulnerable materials are being housed in appropriate conditions and to flag items that need conservation work or conversion off of unplayable media.
An impromptu grave for one A. Pair Pants, from October 25, 1906. The text at the bottom reads, “died of skunk juice.”
In the course of this project, it has been my deep pleasure to explore the many small collections of photography by students, professors and others associated with the college. One of my personal favorites is the collection of Allan W. Forbes, class of 1908. Forbes, who went on to become an engineer after Amherst, was clearly a passionate amateur photographer. His collection contains more than 100 glass plate negatives, nearly 40 nitrate negatives and prints of around half of the images. (more…)
Posted in College buildings, College History, Fraternities, tagged architecture, Blair Kamin on January 30, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Ben Fiedler ’17 and Blair Kamin ’79 in the common room of Mayo-Smith House (formerly Chi Psi Lodge), January 2015. (Photo by Janna Joassainte’17/Amherst College, Office of Communications)
Leave me alone, I’m on deadline!
During the college’s Interterm session that just ended, I enjoyed participating in a one-week class that made extensive use of the College Archives. “The Houses of Amherst College” was an intensive architectural appraisal of the thirteen former fraternity houses on campus. It was led by Blair Kamin ’79, the award-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune. Blair is in the process of writing a comprehensive architectural guide to Amherst College, to be published in 2018 as part of the Campus Guide series by Princeton Architectural Press. All of the students in the class (including myself) wrote a brief essay on one of the houses, which will provide material for the published guide.
Seligman House, formerly Theta Delta Chi. Putnam and Cox, architects, 1921.
